The views in this piece are my own. They express an impatience with the glacial pace of the movement towards strike action and my view that while the subsequent actions proposed are unobjectionable they seemed a bit of an anti-climax to the strike and the demo.
Are we seeing the rebirth of militancy? It’s too early to say though it has been a while since the leading news stories on two consecutive days have been about strikes. Yesterday it was civil servants in the PCS, members of the National Union of Teachers and the University and College Union. Today it has been oil refinery workers who will be taking action to defend their pension scheme.
Many of the young teachers who marched through London yesterday were still at nursery school the last time the National Union of Teachers called a national strike twenty one years ago.
The issue this time was New Labour’s below inflation 2.4% pay settlement which can more accurately be called a pay cut in real terms. The London march was bigger, livelier and younger than anyone could have expected. Ten thousand protestors is a realistic guess and for many of them it would have been their first ever strike and their introduction to trade union militancy and solidarity. The march and rally brought together NUT members and striking UCU members. Mark Serwotka’s presence on the platform and his explicit linking of the public sectors pay battles reminded all the strikers that they had to fight the government together to win.
Brendan Barber is the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress. Not a lot of people know that. He could be called the titular head of the British working class but even readers of this site would be hard pushed to recognise him if he were sitting on the bus beside them. He was dreadful. His rhetorical flourishes exhorted strikers to “win change by pooling resources” and something about “building capacity to rise to the skills challenge”.
In fact leadership has been a problem with the teachers’ pay campaign. Everything was put on hold until the Teachers’ Salary Review Board made its recommendation. That’s the outfit that makes the awkward pay cutting decisions for New Labour. The strike ballot only gave a mandate for one day’s action so that further action requires another ballot and that is unlikely to happen before the summer. The momentum that could have been developed from yesterday is to be dissipated.
Kevin Courtney, one of the union’s leading left figures, admitted as much. Outlining the next steps he began with the dreaded “lobby of parliament” next week. That’s every union leadership’s favourite excuse for doing nothing. Then he asked strikers to take copies of the petition at the back of the hall. You can get your scabs to sign it. He did say that there will be a ballot for more discontinuous action and as any PCS activist will tell you, after their 20+ days in recent years that does not butter any parsnips.
Our Manchester correspondent writes…
About half of the schools in Greater Manchester were either fully or partially closed by the teachers’ strike on Thursday. This is probably fewer than in other parts of the country, and reflects the right wing domination of the two biggest associations – Manchester and Salford. However, it was very apparent on Thursday that a new layer of young radical teaching are emerging through this campaign.
Over 500 attended the strike rally in Manchester, far more than had been expected by the officials who booked the room. The Friends Meeting House was packed to the rafters, with over a hundred unable to squeeze in. Most of those who did get in were young women teachers, lecturers and civil servants. Unfortunately, the radicalism of the young strikers wasn’t reflected by the platform speakers – who spoke about sending postcards to MPs and the TUC lobby of parliament but didn’t issue a clear call for further discontinuous strike action.
The rally was followed by a fantastic, noisy and militant march through the city centre, which had been called by Manchester Trades Council, and which featured banners from a range of unions, both public and private sector. The response of the general public and motorists was noticeably supportive.
Members of the STA and UCU Left have called an Education Activists Meeting for Saturday 10th May at 12 noon in the Friends Meeting House in order to discuss the next steps in the campaign.
Liam redux 
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